Restaurant Marketing – Don’t Do List
It seems there are plenty of people offering advice about what to do in this unfriendly marketing environment. Much of this advice is a sales pitch to get the restaurant owner to buy something, hire a consultant or advertise in some amazing new way to get customers. Few of these schemes will have any short term impact on your restaurant’s performance.
Here is a list of things NOT to do when trying to boost sales in the next 3 to four months:
- Don’t panic! Frustration and fear are poor partners when making business decisions. Use common sense and look for marketing efforts that will make a difference next week, tomorrow or next month.
- Don’t listen to the people telling you that the Internet is the answer to all your marketing needs. It’s not. To develop a working marketing program on the Internet, it takes months or years to do. It is time consuming and can be costly.
- While email marketing is probably the best marketing tool in the restaurateur’s tool bag, if you haven’t started a program by now, use your skills to develop more short term marketing plans. Email marketing will take six to eight months to get returns.
- Increasing advertising in media that hasn’t worked in the past won’t do anything now. Many restaurant owners think the solution to sagging sales is more newspaper advertising or other mass publications. You will just be throwing a bunch of money at a small portion of the overall restaurant marketing equation. You will also just be like hundreds of you competitors doing the same thing. The chances are reduced of a new customer coming from a newspaper ad when more restaurants are being advertised.
- Don’t start some aggressive coupon program that trains your customers to become shoppers for the best deal. They will begin to expect discounts all the time or think you have over priced your product to start with. You may be creating a monster for the future that may be hard to kill. If coupons have been your main source of bringing customers in the door, stick with it. If it is used rarely, don’t change the pattern no matter how tempting it is to offer big discounts.
Now is the time to look for strength within your operation and build on those assets. Start with your existing customers. They are a great source for more business. Be creative. Give your guests more of what they want without giving away your product. Now is a perfect time to partner with non-competing businesses in your area to boost each other’s traffic.
There are many ways to build a re-vitalized a short term marketing program. Spend an hour or two focusing on the short term while working on the long term as time permits.
If you need help, spend a few dollars on The Restaurant Ebook. You will find dozens and dozens of new marketing ideas for both the short and long term. You will get all the tools to create and implement a marketing plan that will carry you through this economic downturn. You get a money back guarantee if it isn’t what you need to build a solid restaurant for now and the future.
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Of course, you have a good recipe. Generating a list of restaurant guests who want to receive regular electronic dispatches is almost as easy as making toast.